Monday, January 21, 2013

(Editor’s note: This essay comes to The Rap Sheet from D.L. Johnstone, author of the best-selling 2012 crime thriller Chalk Valley,
as well as the e-book Furies, released last month. Johnstone lives in
the Toronto, Ontario, area with his wife, their four kids, and their half-dog/half-Sasquatch, Charlie.)

“He wondered for the hundred and first time if he had
arrested the Chalk Valley killer, caught him dead to rights, and was losing him
to the system.” -- from Chalk Valley

Novels about serial-murder investigations have been a staple
subgenre of the thriller oeuvre for decades. Centuries, I suppose, if you
include tales of Bluebeard
and his ilk. In the traditional story arc, the heroic detective must sort
through the clues to find the devious, unknown mastermind, solving whatever
intricate puzzle the killer has set for him, against the backdrop of a ticking
clock. It essentially ends when the killer is unmasked. Personally, I love these
types of thrillers. I even wrote one (Furies). But that’s not how actual serial-murder investigations take place. Not even
close. They’re a lot more complicated, they take far longer, they’re more political,
more bureaucratic, and they are far more painful to those connected to the
investigations.

When I was planning Chalk Valley, I decided I wanted to tell a different
story than the usual serial-murder tale. I wanted to write one that explored
the human drama of these investigations. There’s no mystery who the killer is
in Chalk Valley. His name is revealed in the first sentence of the book,
and by the end of the first chapter, it’s clear what Phil Lindsay is all about.
It saves countless paper cuts from readers skipping to the end of the book for
the Big Reveal. Chalk Valley is a cat-and-mouse portrayal of how a
small-town cop forces his way through the system, bureaucracy, politics, and even
the lead task force to stop Lindsay. And all the while the cop fears additional
victims will be taken because he’s not doing more. That makes for a very
different kind of thriller.

First myth: the murderers. Serial killers are not criminal masterminds.
They’re deviant sociopaths who know how to work the system. They like to
dominate others, degrade them, fill them with dread. The Three D’s. The
successful ones who manage to evade capture for weeks, months, or even years
are clearly bright enough, able to fool their victims and their families and
friends, staying on the loose all the while. But they’re not Hannibal
Lecters. Nor are they the wild-eyed nutbars you see pictures of in post
offices. Those guys are pretty easy to spot--they’re the usual suspects. Serial
killers are often just out there in the community. They may have families,
9-to-5 jobs, mortgages, car payments. And maybe a secret room in their
man-cave. Frankly, that’s a far scarier proposition to most of us, thinking that
such a killer could be living right next door.

Personal revelation moment: Scarborough, Ontario’s Paul Bernardo started out
as the mysterious “Scarborough Rapist,” haunting the neighborhood in eastern
Toronto where I grew up, terrorizing the citizens for a couple of years before
he graduated to become a serial murderer with his creepy little wife, Karla
Homolka, 100 miles down the road. People like them get off on not only
their murders, but also on the impact those killings have on society. It gives
them the opportunity to feel powerful, and to relive the crime over and over
again with every news story. But Bernardo was no mastermind, he was just some
vile deviant. He also went to my high school. I knew his sister. Hell, his
family lived half a mile from where I did.

Second myth: the detectives. OK, this gets a little complicated. If the
murders all take place in one big city, the investigation, while still
dreadfully difficult and painful, is made somewhat simpler. The victim is taken
from and murdered in a single jurisdiction, so the politics are relatively
minimal. But that’s where serial killers can be fairly clever. They take
advantage of the natural inefficiencies of two or more police agencies having
to work together by snatching victims from one or more jurisdictions, killing
them elsewhere, and then disposing of their bodies in yet another location. So
the police not only have to figure out who the victim is, but who is in charge
of the investigation. And if it’s members of a small police agency who are in
the lead, they may not have the expertise to do things properly. It can take
weeks, even months for cops to get their acts together. The associated politics
can be quite brutal--bureaucracy amongst the police is as bad as any other government
agency, with the added wrinkle that there are human lives at stake.

(Left) Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo

In Chalk Valley, which is set in the western Canadian province of
British Columbia, the protagonist is a cop, Sergeant Dave Kreaver. He thinks he
knows who the killer is. Unfortunately, Kreaver works outside the jurisdiction
of the lead investigators and runs into major roadblocks when he tries to get
his suspect considered. Similarly, in the Bernardo/Homolka serial murders, a
street cop received a tip from a woman who said she’d been raped by Bernardo at
a party. The cop followed up and found that Bernardo drove the same kind of car
the killer had been seen driving. He had the right (wrong) kind of personality,
arrogant and smug. He even matched the physical description investigators had
of the killer. The cop worked up his tip--which was promptly ignored by the
case’s Green Ribbon Task Force. The tip was then buried deep until an inquest
pulled it out years later in the Campbell Inquiry’s exploration of the debacle.

Also a factor in these cases is the human cost to the investigators. They might
put in 80-plus hours a week on the job, for months and months, with their supervisors, the media, the victims’ families, and even the general public questioning their every move. What kind of effect does that have on them and their families? Not a good one. On their health? Also, not recommended. But what choice do those investigators have? Plus they’re running up major overtime, which drains the
city budget. If you don’t believe petty issues such as budgets affect major
criminal probes, think again. Remember, police agencies are still at their core
government bureaucracies--they just have badges and guns.

Third myth: the investigation itself. The cops in serial-killer cases
aren’t just sorting through a few intriguing clues, like who killed Colonel
Mustard with a nail-gun in the breakfast nook. They are inundated with leads.
There may be tens of thousands of tips for them to sort through--a
virtual mountain. And thousands of suspects to vet. They have to validate all
of them--how could they not? How else would they know which ones are real or
valuable? It’s like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of needles. And
for any evidence they do want to pursue, the cops will likely need to get
search warrants to make sure it holds up in court. They may need to check out
DNA evidence. Unfortunately, that can take weeks, months, longer.

Are you getting the picture here?

And all of this needs to be balanced against the fear of tunnel vision.
Consider the infamous case of Guy Paul Morin, a resident of Queensville, Ontario, who in 1984 was convicted of murdering his 9-year-old neighbor, Christine Jessop. The inquest found the lead detectives in that investigation had been so focused on Morin as the killer, they actually convinced Christine’s grieving family members to modify their statements as to when they had returned home on the afternoon the girl disappeared. This provided Morin with a sufficient time window within which he could have returned from work and abducted the girl. It led to Morin’s false conviction,
overturned years later on DNA evidence after his life was destroyed.
Christine’s real killer was never caught.

(Right) Author D.L. Johnstone

After I wrote Chalk Valley, I received questions from several readers
who wanted to know if issues like this still take place. Haven’t we made huge
strides in recent years? Haven’t we learned? Yes and no. Major Case Management,
a state-of-the-art, turnkey process to help multiple police jurisdictions in
Canada work together to solve serial crimes, rose from the ashes of the
Bernardo inquest. I spent a lot of time with the MCM architects and ViCLAS (Violent
Crime Linkage Analysis System) investigators when I researched this novel.
The system still isn’t perfect, but everyone is trying to take the right steps.
So that maybe, in time, these sort of obstacles will truly be a thing of the
past.

Yet, let’s look at the 2010 case of disgraced Canadian Forces Colonel Russell Williams, who
raped, tortured, and murdered two women over a two-month span, in addition to
committing a chilling series of fetish break-ins around the rural Ontario
neighborhood where he lived. While DNA testing was thankfully accelerated and
led to his relatively prompt arrest, the Ontario government refuses to make
public the dates Williams’ DNA samples were collected. Defending this action,
the government has made the bizarre claim that revealing such information would
be “an unjustified invasion of personal privacy.” An invasion of a convicted
serial killer’s privacy, mind you. Bureaucracy reigns supreme--no one wants
to look bad. Or expose themselves to negligence lawsuits, I imagine.

Have these improvements changed how investigators act as individuals? So many
times, it comes down to one person doing the right thing. A cop meets someone
she suspects might be a very bad person. She may not have the evidence, no one
may want to listen to her, she may have a number of other responsibilities to
attend to. What should she do? There’s a term in failure theory called the
Organizational Bystander. It might be best defined using the following example:
On January 28, 2010, a female police officer in Belleville, Ontario, noticed
what turned out to be Russell Williams’ Pathfinder
parked beside the home of 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd. It looked out of place.
The officer, now suspicious, knocked on Lloyd’s door. No answer. Williams lurked
in the shadows outside, waiting for the officer to leave. Which she did.
Williams waited for Lloyd to return home, then abducted her, torturing her for
several hours before murdering her. The officer made no note of the SUV’s
license plate and did no computerized search. The OPP (Ontario Provincial
Police) have no protocol requiring this, nor do they plan to implement one.

Organizational Bystanders are all too common. It’s so much easier to assume
that either things aren’t really going all that wrong, or you can’t have an
actual effect on the outcome of things. It’s so much easier just to stand by
and watch, to not speak up, to let the adults do their thing. You don’t want to
be admonished, treated as a troublemaker, a Chicken Little. It might affect
your career advancement. It’s so much easier to take your chances, bite your
tongue, and hope things don’t fail.

Those with the courage to take action when facing potential crises are all too
rare. Or maybe not--when things go right, do we even notice?

* * *

Author’s note: All the examples I’ve given here are Canadian. My
apologies to Canadian crime investigators everywhere--many of them are among the best
in the world. I chose these examples simply because I know them well and spent time
with investigators whose job it is to study and learn from them. These same
issues exist in all nations, across all police jurisdictions.

1 comment:

I review a lot of TV shows and the two genres that really annoy me are forensic shows and genius serial killers.

The Following and Criminal Minds are two of the most recent ones I've watched, with the murderers able to elude armies of police and having wacky MOs (eye gouging, sewing up mouths). Hannibal Lector has a lot to answer for.

Chalk Valley sounds like it might be a far more intelligent and interesting take on such killers.

There was a superb drama in the UK in 2000 called This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. This was compelling because Peter Sutcliffe evaded the police for so long not because he was a Chianti-quoffing master brain, but because of the deficiencies in the police investigation. It was a really powerful story, showing how the investigation damaged the health of the leading detective.

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